an inspiring success story to be sure, but Blue circle didn’t question Quinn’s theories of cement making, did they? Seems more about overcoming religious intolerance* than in disputing Quinn’s invention or creation of new cement making technology.
*Protestant v. Catholic in Ireland involves far more than mere religious differences.
Nobody at the time thought the world was flat.
William Smith.
He wasn’t ostracized because they thought he was wrong, though. Rather, other, better established, scientists plagiarized his work so that, for years, he received little credit and was unable to make money, as he had hoped, by selling the geological map that he had created, because plagiarized versions were undercutting him. This could happen because Smith and the other geologists of the time were not peers. He was a man of humble origins who had worked his way up to being a civil engineer, and the geological establishment, consisted of upper-class gentleman-scientists who could not take someone who had risen from the lower classes seriously. (The story did have a happy ending, though. In the end his achievement was recognized and he got a pension from the King.)
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was ridiculed about his discovery of his eponymous limit (concerning the maximum mass of a white dwarf star) by Sir Arthur Eddington. Chandrasekhar eventually won the Nobel Prize for this work.
BSA referring to “Birmingham Small Arms”, the well-known arms and motorbike manufacturer in the UK.
It took a lot of 
and Googling before working out that’s what you were referring to, by the way.
Aahhh! :smack: Light dawns - I was wondering where the Boy Scouts came in.
Injured pride also brought Darwin a lot of grief for his theory.
When a book called “100 Authors Against Einstein” was published, his version of maniacal laughter was to reply, “If I’m wrong, one would be enough”.
Female tanks, obviously. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MkIVFemaleTankAshfordKent.jpg
STM Microscope widely ridiculed
"Maybe it was too big—or too small—a leap for his colleagues to fathom. Whatever the
reason, the hostility of fellow surface scientists was unvarnished when James K.
Gimzewski spoke at a 1985 surface-physics meeting about viewing a single molecule
with a new type of instrument—the scanning tunneling microscope.
“They laughed me off the stage. It was new and they hated it,” he says.
Microscopists were no more welcoming, says Gimzewski, a physicist at IBM’s Zurich
Research Laboratory in Rüschlikon, Switzerland, where the scanning tunneling microscope
(STM) was invented by his colleagues.
Heinrich Rohrer, who was to share the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics with IBM colleague Gerd
Karl Binnig for his part in the invention, “asked me go to Australia and give a lecture at an
international conference on microscopy. All the TEM [transmission electron microscope] guys
were shouting and laughing off their heads,” Gimzewski recalls.
Thanks for a better synopsis. And yes he got his recognition in the end, relevant to the OP.
